The Only Winning Move

If crime fiction is the most deconstructed genre, then because it was also the most constructed. And in its way, it was always the most self-aware. We read any book in any genre to “find out what happens” after all. Crime fiction just went ahead and codified that. Any story in any genre is ultimately driven by the interacting motivations and desires of its characters. Crime fiction just took the liberty of listing these neatly. Any theme in any genre stands or falls on its moral implications. Crime fiction went ahead and focused its ethics discussions on murder. And. so. on.

On finishing Arnaldur Indriðason’s much-lauded Silence of the Grave, these are the kinds of thoughts that occur. And that because this book seems so frustratingly determined to get away with violating as many crime fiction conventions as it possibly can.

I read somewhere the suggestion that Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was meant to be a sending up of “Jumping the Shark”. Every episode of that season takes some common “tonight on a very special episode of … ” cliche and exploits it. (Nice touch: an actual shark-demon makes an appearance in “Tabula Rasa,” and Buffy has an opportunity to jump over it.) There’s the one where she dies and gets brought back to life. The one where “they get married” (or don’t). The one where “they do it.” The one where “our friend’s evil now.” The one where “it’s all a dream.” Even the one that’s a musical! It was brilliant, in its meta-fictiony way, because although all that was played for laughs, the real story also went on in its very real way, and We the Audience were left with the uncomfortable feeling that we were being punished for not being able to let go of our heroine when it was actually time (i.e. last season).

That’s kind of how I feel about “Silence of the Grave.” It’s really hard to take this book entirely seriously a lot of the time because it seems so determined to be the least crime-fictiony of any crime fiction you’ve ever read. I think the most galling moment for me was the denoument - when, rather than having the traditional scene where Erlendur (the detective in this particuar one) confronts the villain and he confesses, a character we’ve never met before turns up to just tell us the story, mentioning in the process that both the villain and victim are long dead. Seriously - this was a “mystery” where the police get interviewed on TV about an old crime, and someone who’s known the solution for years just shows up to tell them what it is, and no one is brought to justice at all.

But of course it turns all the traditional rules on their heads. The villain, for one thing, is so thoroughly a villain that he might as well be wearing a mask and black cape. If it’s become fashionable to build up some sympathy with the bad guy by, at the very least, making him psychologically plausible through backstory, then this book is a leisure suit. Absolutely nothing positive is ever said about him. Nothing. It’s true that we have vague memories of hearing some positive things about him - but think about it, it didn’t actually happen, did it? What you think was a psychological explanation for his behavior was actually his victims speculating about same. We don’t ACTUALLY know where he came from, or what his childhood was like, or what led him to do the things he did. Which was really satisfying if I’m allowed to read that as a satire on the pop psychology that pervades so many mystery novels these days - and I think I am.

And then there’s the matter of the mystery. It isn’t actually a “whodunnit” so much as a “whoboughtit?” Throughout the novel, we’re more interested in the identity of the victim than in the identity of the killer. If most mystery novels get the crime out of the way early, this one doesn’t even tell you what the crime was until it’s all over. Which is again kind of satisfying as a metafictional statement. A crime novel needs a crime - any crime will do - as something on which to hang its action. So in a clever way, Indriðason is pointing out that the actual nature of the crime hardly matters!

And the pacing. My God, this was the most brazen flouting of conventions I think I’ve ever seen. As one point in her narrative, the person who’s come forward to fill in the detective on what happened decides to turn in for the night and finish her story in the morning, right there at a chapter break! Unbelievable! But it wasn’t just that. There was also the oh-so-convenient fact that the body had to be unearthed slowly, as in an archaeological excavation. At so many points when a crucial bit of information from the dig would’ve been helpful if on hand, you can almost hear Indriðason rubbing his hands together with glee over the computer as he types that the detective will just have to wait because the dig is taking a long time. How very, very convenient. (And how very interesting that for all that the archaeologists don’t end up telling us anything that a simple digging up couldn’t have.) But of course the way relevant information shows up in any novel (and not just detective novels!) is at the whim of the author. Part of the illusion that makes it possible to get involved with a book is our ability to forget that - but Indriðason is determined not to let us!

And of course you can almost hear him chuckling at the inevitable clever lit crit student rushing to write about how brushing dirt off of the body slowly is brushing dust lovingly off of an old, forgotten, but still important thing, breathing life into it, blah blah blah. The metaphors basically write themselves here, which is the “ok, let’s do it, bad boy! Take me!” rape defense applied to literature. If you’re handing lit crit grad students their thematic analysis on a platter like this, maybe they’ll just lose interest and leave you alone? It’s no fun without a fight, right?

And the MacGuffin is an actual bone! The story starts when a human rib shows up at a child’s birthday party, which just happens to be attended by a medical student with enough training to identify it. Why not?

Another one that I would’ve missed but for having read this review: there are lots of mentions of Iceland without telling us all that much about Iceland.

For example, here are some of the things I discovered about Iceland from Silence of the Grave. Yellow police tape is used to surround crime scenes. During Christmas, they listen to Bing Crosby sing White Christmas (presumably in English, unless Bing really covered his bases). Their garages are filled with old bikes and barbeque grills. The lead detective is haunted by various mistakes he made in his Past. And when these harried cops are in a rush, they scarf down cheap hamburgers.

HA! But again, I wonder if this isn’t by design. In fairness, some post-war Icelandic history does play an important role - though not, one hastens to add, a role that is by any means indispensible. (There is absolutely no reason in the world why the savior American soldier needs to have been an American soldier. He could, just as easily, have been a random Icelander.) But the riff here seems to be on the “exotic locale” fetish in a lot of crime fiction. So many of these stories are sold as though they depend on a particular location when in fact largely similar crimes happen everywhere. And so it is with this one - it’s a pretty nation/culture-neutral situation that just happens to be punctuated by a lot of Icelandic names - names that stand out in an almost comedic way, like Rose Nylund talking about St. Olaf. Again I wonder whether Indriðason isn’t setting his readers up to fail. The credulous reader (foreign reader, anyway) will read these people’s problems as in some way a commentary on Icelandic society, when the story is actually as universal as it is banal. The sendup is of people who think they can learn much about a culture through detective fiction.

Or - who knows - maybe I’m imagining all this. Maybe this is meant to be taken very seriously, maybe none of this is metafictional commentary, and maybe Indriðason really wrote it all with a straight face.

But I doubt it.

Still, it’s a mistake to read this entirely as a send-up. The backstory about Erlendur’s brother and how it affects his relationship with his daughter in the present - these are at least meant to be taken seriously. And while Indriðason may well be having a laugh at the expense of politically correct types who fight wife-beating with political slogans and taboos rather than more sensitive attempts to understand where it comes from, of course he isn’t laughing at the violence itself, which he paints with sobering realism. And it’s interesting [SPOILER ALERT] that the wife-beating ends only when the wife is pregnant by another man. There’s more being said about gender relations here than meets the eye, even if the male villain is overtly a caricature. [END SPOILERS]

In the end, I don’t know quite what to make of this book. I like it a lot, and feel like I shouldn’t. Which is to say, I don’t know why I like it. It’s one of those things where all the parts are wrong, and yet the whole works - somehow. I will need to read it again someday.

Deathbed conversions have always seemed to me like a Hail Mary Pass, proving nothing about religion and much about desperation.

That’s a great line from a pretty great Roger Ebert blogpost about Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is dying, you see - of cancer, so it’s painful and takes a long time. He may survive, but in any case he’s pretty badly in the thick of it right now. So, predictably, all kinds of despicable religious groups are hovering over his still-breathing corpse like undertakers waiting for him to babble something about belief in God so that they can take it as whatever low standard of “confirmation” they operate by.

I think it’s remarkable that religious people seem to need this kind of confirmation. One would think that it would be just the opposite. One would think that they would be embarassed to put so many eggs in a basket so easily refuted. People break, after all, under torture and say all kinds of things that they don’t really mean - that are, in fact, in sharp contradiction to everything they actually believe in - on a hope that they KNOW is illusory that it will somehow save them from pain. That’s just how it works. Why would a deathbed conversion be anything else? It is in fact exactly the same - you scare someone enough (and death is scary!) and he will say anything, even if he knows it’s not true. Using deathbed conversions as confirmation that your belief system is true is a bit like using Galileo’s confession under torture as evidence that the Sun revolves around the Earth. The actual Truth is always beside the point with these people.

Indeed, we should be suspicious of ANYTHING associated with someone who has nothing to lose. Curiously, religion seems to depend mostly on exactly that. All religious conversion stories - at least, all the famous ones - are about desperate people grasping at straws. That means something, and it’s not very flattering to religion.

Sometimes I think we should nominate the False Dilemma for a special Facebook award - you know, for being the argumentative fallacy most frequently featured on Facebook. Not a week goes by that I don’t see it on proud display in some friend’s status update.

This week’s is: “X thinks we can find better ways to innovate than developing porn movies in 3-D.”

Well, sure, no doubt we can. As a statement of fact, it’s unassailable. And yet pragmatically I know she means more than that. She means her audience to infer that because there are better ways to innovate, we should naturally choose to focus on those ways rather than this way.

Missing from this argument, of course, is any evidence that innovation in porn video technology in any way crowds out innovation in other areas. The error is particularly galling in this case since not only is there NO reason to believe this, there is in fact no reason to believe that the porn industry is responsible for this innovation in the first place. And indeed, a quick google search turns up a lot of references to a $3million Hong Kong 3-D porn flick that’s apparently the first of its kind, but NO indication whatever that any special porn-specific technology happens to have been developed for this film. Quite the contrary, the impression one gets is that it’s simply co-opting technology that’s been available for other genres of film for years and … using it to shoot a porn. So it’s a bit like saying, really, upon the occasion of the first nude photograph being taken, that we, as a society, are wasting our time “innovating” pointing cameras at nude bodies when we could be inventing other things instead. Because, you know, I’m sure the dude who first accomplished pointing a camera at a nude body and pulling the shutter was just chock-full of other ideas that are now lost to posterity forever. There they were, in his head, and the moment he pulled the shutter and had time for other things, nope! time’s up! too late! No more egg rolls for you! Oh, the humanity!

It’s such obvious tripe. Taking technology that’s already developted, pointing it at a target that some given moralist doesn’t like, and concluding from this that we missed out on some other unspecified innovation takes a special kind of mental laziness. And it takes an even specialer kind of mental laziness to assume - as the author of this FB post apparently does - that whatever is developed in and for the porn industry can’t possibly spill out to other kinds of movies (or general image technology). As though, say, since the first movie filmed was an ordinary garden scene, all movies must be garden scenes? Can’t use motion picture tecnology for anything else? Please.

So, let’s go over this again. Just because there’s the one thing, and the other thing, doesn’t mean that there’s not also the “still other thing” and the “even different thing” as well. If you want to present me with two options (a. we innovate for the porn industry vs. b. we innovate for “something else”) and you expect me to take one or the other of them, you’ve got to first convince me that these are, in fact, the only two options. Importantly, in this case, you’ve got to convince me that there’s even reason to believe that the two options you give me are mutually exclusive.

In this case, of course, they are NOT EVEN REMOTELY mutually exclusive, for it turns out we can innovate for one thing AND for the other thing all at once! Which is damned lucky, if you think about it, because I’d be really afraid of the kind of Devil’s Bargain where humanity got to pick one, and only one, innovation to pursue at a time! What a mess working that out would be!

Seriously - the person who wrote this FB post is in her 30s and a journalist. There is no excuse.

If you like crime fiction at all, you may have noticed that a lot of the best authors are currently from Sweden - and felt a little odd about that. But there it is - a lot of the best crime fiction writers are currently from Sweden. It’s so noticeable recently that the Germans have even given it a subgenre name all of its own: Schwedenkrimi.

But just being from a country doesn’t make you a genre, right? So what’s a Schwedenkrimi really? Is it just a crime story written by a Swede about Swedes for Swedes and set in Sweden? Having just finished Johan Theorin’s Echoes from the Dead, I’d like to give a tentative “no.”

This is a book that’s - to borrow a great Luke Burrage quip - “very much set in Sweden,” so there’s no question of its national creds. And it has at least hints of the social commentary that a lot of critics have noticed in Mankell and Larsson, the dueling (bucept that Larsson’s recently deceased) kings of the genre. But it’s the wrong commentary. And it’s the wrong Sweden.

Theorin’s Sweden is cold, misty and pervaded by beautiful wilderness. It managed to stay neutral in WWII without much of a cultural or political price. It’s a place where the elderly get personal care in state homes and a grieving mother can extend her sick leave indefinitely with only minor bending of the rules. True, there have been some budget cuts recently, but we barely notice them. (There was no bus shelter at a stop on a nearly-uninhabited island when our hero found himself without an umbrella in the rain, for example.) And true, there are lots of annoying mainland tourists on the previously unspoilt island where the action takes place, but then, the country is also richer and more populous than it used to be. In short, this is the Sweden we’ve heard so much about … and so maybe not one that we needed a Swede to describe to us.

There’s social commentary, but it’s also exactly the kind of social commentary we expect a citizen of this Sweden to write. It all starts with a bit of inequality. Young Nils Kant doesn’t get as many toffees as his brother. It was probably an innocent mistake: Nils got his some time before Axel; probably Mother just forgot how many she’d given out. But a child’s world is much smaller and more personal and more immediate than ours, and how many toffees you get matters. Nils ends up tricking his brother into drowning in the sound, half-aware of what he’s doing. And having killed (sort of) this once, he finds himself able to cripple later, and eventually he ups the ante enough to kill in cold blood. (This isn’t a spoiler: we’re told early on that Nils Kant is a killer; the central question in the novel is whether or not Jens Davidsson is one of his victims.) In all cases, there are circumstances, and none of Nils’ actions are premeditated, exactly. But what premeditated crimes do occur in the novel are reactions to him, the results of things he set in motion - whether protecting him or trying to take revenge on him. So it really does begin with those toffees - and if there’s anything special about Nils’ circumstances that push him over the edge (not every child who gets shorted toffees and ends up exacting some kind of horrible revenge out of childish short-sightedness and lack of emotional control ends up beating people with oars and shooting them to death, after all), it’s that he’s raised as an only child in a privileged family. His mother tells him he’s entitled, superior - and so he is.

This is all pretty standard Social Democracy. People are neither good nor bad by nature - nature is in fact something that is largely acquired through social interaction. Fix the society, and you fix the individual. And you fix the society by making sure that everyone gets his “fair share.” So - be very careful not to give anyone more toffees than anyone else! And if someone does get more toffees than someone else - where “toffees” might here be, say, a metaphor for getting a bank loan to modernize your shipping company that other seafarers on the island didn’t get - it’s definitely not because he earned them in any way. Nope - inequality is always and everywhere a result of accident or corruption - and inequality itself corrupts. Even the author’s political opinions are a Swedish stereotype, in other words, and again we question whether we really needed an actual Swede to write this.

Mankell and Larsson’s books, by contrast, really couldn’t have been written by anything BUT Swedes, and that’s because they’re telling us things about the Swedish welfare state that no outsider could possibly know. In fact, they’re telling us things most outsiders don’t even want to know. It isn’t just that their villains tend to be corrupt representatives of that state. There’s corruption everywhere, after all, and if our stereotype of Sweden doesn’t make much room for it, it would take hyper-naivete to be honestly surprised about it. No - it’s more than that. The state IS the villain - and not so much in the kind of way that you can put your finger on. Like one suspects must be the case with all political novelists, Mankell and Larsson have turned to fiction to describe things that they think they know but can’t exactly prove. It’s a feeling more than anything - that there’s something really creepy at the heart of the whole setup.

The source of the evil is different, of course. For Larsson, it seems to be the uneasy compromise that Sweden made with the Nazis in WWII. In what I guess Larsson views as cowardice, Sweden made a separate peace to keep from being invaded, and it let a lot of ruthless Nazi sympathizers into the halls of power. What masquerades as patriotism, a healthy confidence in and devotion to one’s nation, is for Larsson in fact something much more sinister. For Mankell it’s harder to say. In fact Mankell rallies a lot against Swedish racism and xenophobia as well, so perhaps the compromise with the Nazis is implicated for him too. But in other books - especially Sidetracked - the problem seems to follow a more orthodox Marxist analysis. The trouble with Socialist Sweden is that it never went through a revolution - it was all too comfortable, and so the people in power are the people who would be in power anyway, in any society, only more sinister because they have more power. It amounts to the same thing, I suppose - a cowardly compromise somewhere in the early history of the welfare state leaves a beast lurking at the heart of the system.

The point is just that, having finished Theorin, I felt this lacking. The welfare state wasn’t the enemy. What criticism it came in for was pretty pedestrian, really - there for signaling purposes more than anything (Theorin can’t be taken seriously as a writer if he’s politically easy to satisfy, now, can he?). Instead, it was the enemies of the welfare state - or at least the enemies of the welfare state’s ideals - that were the villain here. More accurately, it was the imperfect implementation of the welfare state. Doling out the incorrect number of toffees can happen to anyone, of course - that’s just noise in the system. The problem here is that what should be a blip was amplified by Nils’ privileged circumstances into something really ugly, something that becomes the source of Evil in the novel, even if that Evil isn’t contained in any single action or individual. The question is - when first confronted with a salient inequality, which do you conclude? Do you determine to fight inequality so that others don’t have to suffer under the same dejection as victims of inequality that you did? Or do you decide that the world is inherently unfair, that there are winners and losers, and determine to be one of the winners? The trouble is, since empathy is imperfectly formed in children, the deck is stacked in favor of the latter interpretation. So if society doesn’t act to fix it, Nietzschean culture is the inevitable result. Or, such seems to be the point of view that Theorin is pushing. Nils Kant only is the way he is because his formative years happened when the welfare state was young - when there hadn’t yet been time to level everything out. Later, when equality is a national ideal taught in secondary schools and enforced by the tax code, would Nils really be able to feel so privileged? Privileged enough to strike out savagely at those who questioned his status? Theorin wants you to think it unlikely.

And maybe it is. There are always tradeoffs, and probably welfare states do mitigate a lot of petty criminal impulses. Enforced equality almost certainly does lower resentment. The question is what you have to pay for that, and whether it’s worth it? Theorin’s book fails for me because it doesn’t ask that question (doesn’t even acknowledge that the question is there). In short, the commentary here isn’t wrong in any particulars, but it’s incomplete, which is worse, from a certain point of view. No one likes a yes man, and an author who sets out to critique his society and comes to the conclusion that it’s basically wonderful, that if anything it needs to be truer to itself - keep on keepin’ on, but maybe a little harder, comes off like a hack. As I said, this isn’t a Sweden that we needed a Swede to tell us about, really, since it’s the kind of Sweden that every politically correct intellectual everywhere in the world assumes Sweden already is. That, I would like to believe, keeps it from being a full-blooded Schwedenkrimi. This is just a Krimi that takes place in Schweden.

Mankell and Larsson have more to say. They have uncomfortable things to say. And if Larsson seems to be battling straw mans a bit (how many honest-to-God Heil-Hitlering Nazis can there really be in Sweden?), at least his delivery is unflinching. Mankell and Larsson want the world (presumably including especially their countrymen) to know that Sweden is NOT perfect, that indeed it might in fact be rotten. And this - since it isn’t what we’re used to hearing - is a much more interesting and informative point of view. All the more appealing to me personally, I must admit, because they read like Libertarians.

They’re not. Emphatically not. Both Mankell and Larsson were social activists from the very far Left. But in a strange way all extremists are brothers - if only because we all advance social theories that are unlikely to be tried, affording us the luxury of infinite hedging about what “life would be like” under our chosen systems. Well, that plus a heartfelt opposition to the status quo (mere tweaking isn’t enough!). And if the enemy of my enemy isn’t exactly my friend, he’s still the enemy of my enemy, and with enemies as powerful as the state I’ll take all the help I can get. The thing about both Mankell and Larsson is that they depict abuses of state power that can only be abuses of state power - in the sense that the victims have nowhere else to turn because all the alternatives have been shut down. That is at least a shared fear with Libertarians. It’s not that we don’t mistrust corporate power - we do. We nevertheless prefer it to state power in many cases because rivals among corporations have a way of keeping the ecosystem balanced. I doubt that Mankell and Larsson have a preference one way or the other - they just happen to live in a society where state and corporate power are the same - where they feed each other. For Sweden is, after all, a classic example of what the term “National Socialism” might have meant without all the agressive militarism and syphilitic lunacy of the Holocaust. That is, a brand of corporatism where the strength and health of the nation is the primary economic goal. Sweden’s brand has a softer edge than Germany’s or Japan’s, but it’s essentailly the same thing. If Mankell and Larsson are more radical socialists, then they share a commitment to internationalism - to human rights and dignity for all, regardless of national origin.

Theorin wouldn’t deny that, obviously. No doubt he believes that human rights are universal too. But believing in something and making it a priority are different, and internationalism just doesn’t seem to be a priority for him. He talks about Sweden the way that a guitar enthusiast talks about an Ibanez: he can tell you the flaws if you ask, but mostly he just likes rambling on about things he loves. The purpose here seems to have been to write an enjoyable thriller that would earn some kind of kudos for being deeper than just an escapist crime novel. Which is the whole paradoxical problem with it, really: it aims to please. It wants to be escapist entertainment for the kind of person who thinks himself above that sort of thing. It wants to be politically aware, but doesn’t want to rock the boat. It even does the oh-so-hip bit of flirting with supernaturalism. You know, nothing that could be called religious or even credulous - just enough dropped there for people who think “there are more things in Heaven and Earth (, Horatio, ) than are dreamt of in your philosophy” is a clever way of being an atheist without offending the religious. All very chic; all very lacking in balls. Yes, I said it: in the schoolyard of Swedish crime fiction, Theorin is the studious nerd and Mankell and Larsson are the big kids. Kickball: Mankell and Larsson are the team captains, and Theorin gets picked maybe 6th? Because Mankell and Larsson have something to say; Theorin, for all his pretentions to the contrary, is just writing beach books.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (”Men Who Hate Women” in the original) is basically the perfect movie at this point in time. It’s socially conscious without being PC, it’s atmospheric but not artsy, it’s an intelligent thriller that’s neither ironic, nor overly reliant on plot twists. It’s a genre film that’s about more than genre commentary. I loved it.

I loved it because it’s slow. It doesn’t seem like it will be just at first: you’re plunged down into the middle of a libel suit with a helpful reporter narrating the setup on the evening news. But from there we see a bunch of seemingly unconnected scenes, so it’s alright. We trust they’ll get around to having all these people meet each other - and they do.

I loved it because it’s fun. The protagonist (erm, one of them) basically gets hired to solve a locked room mystery involving a bunch of rich people who live on an island. Why not? Why should we be above these things?

I loved it because it has a fetish chick. Tough bisexual biker girl hacker with nose rings and spiked collars and Black no. 1 hair. Which of us born in 1975 hasn’t wanted one of those?

I loved it because it’s graphic without being indulgent. All together now: the violence we see is realistic and in the service of a theme, not there merely for shock value.

I loved it because the characters are believable stereotypes. Seriously. I think you have to decide early on if your narrative is going to be primarily character- or plot-driven, given the time constratints of a movie. This one chose “plot-driven” and took responsibility for its choice. The two protagonists are familiar types from genre lit fleshed out just enough to make them believable, to make us care about them, to make us want to find out more about why they are the way they are. It made them memorable, and it didn’t care whether they were unique.

On the whole, if you had to pick one word to describe this picture, it’s “competent,” and sometimes that’s just what you’re looking for. I no longer want my mind blown - I’ve got too much education for that now. I don’t want action and special effects because I’ve seen enough movies that it all seems staged. I don’t want plot twists because they remind me I’m watching a movie. Most of all I don’t want art. I’ve had too many tedious conversations with too many hipsters who know entierly too much about filmmaking at this point that sometimes I just need the auteur to get out of my way. There’s something to be said for exploring the medium, mind you, but at some point it’s time to take the results of your experimentation and put them to use, rather than addressing them directly.

The only thing that bothers me about this movie is that I - and apparently Andrew O’Heir (Salon.com) too - can’t quite shake the feeling that this movie is getting away with something, and I haven’t decided whether that’s OK. From O’Heir’s take:

Rapace, a brooding beauty who won a Swedish Oscar for this performance — and also appears in two more forthcoming installments of this series — invests Lisbeth with a powerful, wounded dignity; she’s much more than a Lara Croft-style cartoon. But there’s no point denying that Lisbeth, as we see her here, is also a male fantasy, albeit one inflected with a contemporary brand of p.c. sexual ideology. … On one hand, there’s nothing to complain about here: Sure, Mikael’s a lot older, but he’s plenty attractive, and Lisbeth’s an adult who gets to make her own decisions. Wasn’t the point of feminism, after all, that a gal gets to pick her own partners for her own reasons? Lisbeth initiates the relationship, and although Mikael clearly falls hard for her, he’s smart enough to grasp that any claims of proprietorship will drive her away fast. As a portrait of a relationship between two individuals, “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is plenty cool. But I can’t help feeling that in so many ways this movie is also an ingenious dodge, a device for getting its boomer hero into bed with a hot young quasi-lesbo biker babe while exclaiming, “Feminism yay! Sexual violence boo!”

Right. I had that feeling too. And that feeling’s gotta be on the mark because the author supposedly wrote these books (the books on which this film is based) for fun in the evenings, not really intending to publish them at first (actually, they came out only when he died, though I read on the nets that he was planning to publish them in the hopes that they would provide for his retirement eventually). Mikael is a pretty obvious Stieg Larsson(author) stand-in/alter ego; if these novels are Larsson’s evening fantasies, then why can’t he have the girl of his dreams? If he can contrive a situation to make it happen and manage to make it not seem too contrived, then more power to him.

The situation, by the way, is that Protagonist One - the guy on trial for libel and the guy who gets hired to solve that missing girl mystery on the locked-room island of rich folks - is a washed-up journalist who made a professional misstep and is paying the price. He works for a left-wing alternative press journal that makes exposing Swedish right-wing extremism - especially when it’s racist (and when is it ever not?) - its mission. Naturally, being a left-wing journalist, he’s also concerned about abuse of women, but it maybe takes a second seat to fighting racism. OK. Lisabeth - the other protagonist (the aforementioned genius hacker biker goth chick) - is herself the victim of a lot of sexual violence, including quite recently at the hands of her probation officer. She’s hired to spy on Mikael by the same people who sent him on the case, and since that case turns out to involve a lot of tortured and murdered women in the background, she takes an interest and ends up an equal partner. Since they’re both victims of society involved on a lonely assignment, they fuck. Of course. It’s annoying because it actually might be believable.

That’s the question: is their relationship believable, or just believable enough? The fact that we can’t easily tell says a lot about the problematic position feminism has worked itself into. If a lot of people groan whenever feminism comes up it’s because it has an image of “permanent revolution,” of never being satisfied. Last year’s heroines are this year’s dupes. And so we never quite trust - when we see a hip girrrrl making a sexual choice - that she isn’t one of those dupes. Is Lisbeth? I wish I knew. But the real point is that no one likes a person who feels the need to apologize about something but clevers his way out of actually doing it, so if that’s what Larsson is up to here I want to know about it, damnit! Yeah, OK, I can’t prove it, and maybe that means I shouldn’t let it stand in the way of enjoying a good story. And hey - I don’t - it’s not a dealbreaker. Just a nagging doubt.

But in a way, that’s what the movie is “about” to begin with. At some point the world got media savvy, and for all the benefits of that there’s a price to be paid in enjoyment. It’s hard to sit down and just get absorbed in a movie without all the critical buzz constantly playing in the background. To a certain extent, of course, that critical buzz is half the fun these days. Sort of like how Chess becomes a different game entirely once you get some formal training. Sure, Bobby Fischer complains that memorizing analyzed Chess openings masks real problem-solving skill (and so advocates the use of randomized opening setups), and he has a point - but it’s also undeniable that there’s a whole different level of enjoyment in knowing the history and the theory, being able to put players choices into a broader context. Still, it’s one thing to study opening theory as a way of improving your game and another entirely to study opening theory to get a trump card on unstudied opponents. Irony and metafiction are the film analogue of the latter.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo succeeds because it’s politically aware only to the extent of wanting to do the right thing, and metafictionally aware only to the extent of picking out the workable formulas and giving credit to their sources. It’s a film that shouldn’t be too hard to deconstruct, and I’m sure that’s just around the corner. But now, while it’s fresh, I’m enjoying just having enjoyed it.

Here’s a beauty of a line from an AFP article on the Arizona immigration law:

“We regret that this law has a racist and xenophobic spirit that goes against immigration in general and illegal immigrants in particular,” said a statement by parliament leaders of Mexico, Ecuador, Uruguay, Panama, Bolivia, Guatemala, Cuba and Chile.

Awesome. Parliament Leaders of Mexico would like to complain about a US immigration law being “racist and xenophobic.” That’s rich, considering that the Mexican “Law of Population” goes much, much further, and has as its stated aim the maintaining of demographic balance in Mexico. The trick is, you can’t be ashamed of your racism if you don’t care you’re racist? Here’s a summary of article 34 (Wikipedia):

Foreigners may be denied entry for the following reasons, if: No international reciprocity, The national demographic balance is altered, It is deemed harmful to the national economic interests, he/she has violated national law or have a poor record abroad, deemed not physically or mentally healthy. For a foreigner to pursue other activities in addition to those that have been expressly authorized, requires permission from the Interior Ministry.

Emphasis added, of course. Not only that, but overstaying a visa in Mexico is a felony offense that carries a minimum fine of $400 and a possible jail term of 2 years. So not only is Mexican immigration law ACTUALLY concerned with demographics (unlike Arizona’s law, which is only accused of being concerned with demographics), it’s also guilty of the most (legally) controversial part of the Arizona law: criminalizing illegal immigrant status. And that proviso in the Arizona law that makes it a crime to look for work without legal status? Yeah, Mexico goes ya one step further there - making it illegal even for LEGAL immigrants to look for work without the government’s permission.

As for requiring authorities to check the immigration status of people they pick up - the part of the Arizona law that has generated the most press - Mexico’s been doing that for years. It is, in fact, Article 37 of the Law of Population:

The authorities of the Republic, whether federal, local or municipal, as well as public notaries, are obliged to check if foreigners are legally in the country

So there you go. It’s just astonishingly hypocritical. Oh yeah, and of course none of this was mentioned in the AFP article. Object lesson in doing background checks on what you read in the mainstream press. Here’s a longer article about it from the Washington Times.

Way to go MSNBC! Sarah Palin uses the word “refudiate,” which she invented, in a Tweet, and this is apparently news. Can’t have misuse of the English language, after all! But here’s the howler: in the same article, MSNBC leaves out the possessive apostrophe three times in the same paragraph. Gee, it’s almost like you need an editor to check things because mistakes will happen, eh?

Since they’ll change it eventually, here’s a screen capture of the offending paragraph:

Don’t get me wrong - Palin’s in the public spotlight and should read over her Tweets before she fires them off if she wants to be taken seriously. This isn’t junior high. But you gotta love MSNBC jumping on her for misuse of the English language while misusing the English language.

At the request of Jeff Metcalf, I’m posting some thoughts on why I like Soccer. I’m not honestly sure how I feel about this. Which sport you follow is a matter of taste - and while I do think there are generally articulable reasons for why we like the things we do (”it’s a matter of taste” is not the end of the discussion), those reasons are often as complex as they are inconsequential. Meaning: all this might come out sounding a little fussy and silly[UPDATE: this is a poorly-chosen word. What I mean is just that the reasons for why we like the things that we like aren't always very revealing about our character. Sometimes listening to someone ramble about why he likes what he likes is boring, and I suspect this to be one of those times.]. So be it. Also - I guess I should apologize for picking on NFL - but that just seems kind of inevitable in discussions about Soccer. It’s the closest analogue, really, and probably for that reason it does seem to be the NFL fans that have the hardest time living and letting live on this (and so I always feel like it’s NFL that I’m on the defensive about). And yes, in spite of Jeff’s request that we call it “AF,” I’m sticking with “NFL.” I understand that NFL is not the governing body for all of American Rules Football, but it’s certainly the most important organization in that sport, and anyway it’s just a matter of ingrained habit now to call Football “NFL” when comparing it to Soccer. I get Jeff’s concerns, but they’re not important enough to me to cause me to change my speech patterns. (Jeff, feel free to call Soccer “FIFA” in the comments in retaliation!)

Things I like about Soccer:

(1) Visible agility. I get that a lot of sports require great agility, but it’s rare in a team sport to be able to see it so clearly. In the case of both NFL and Hockey, there are just too many entirely-too-bulky people clustered together wearing too much crap for me to be able to see athletic ability unfolding in real time. You can catch it on the slowed-down replay with the help of a commentator and fancy camera angles, but for that I might as well just watch the highlights. In soccer, you can see the fancy footwork as it happens. Granted, not as well as in the replay, but it’s at least there. In this field, Basketball and Soccer got the goods, and that’s really about it. Otherwise, you’re watching individual sports, like UFC or Tennis.

(2) Normal people. There’s a kind of freakshow quality to Basketball and NFL that I’m just not in to. At the end of the day, I like athletes to look like healthier-than-average adults, but nothing too extreme. When I’m looking at people like Shaq, it feels a bit like being at the zoo - in the sense that I marvel at the powerful beast, but it just doesn’t seem entirely human. I like watching humans. So - Tennis, Soccer, etc. UFC, NFL, NBA - not so much.

(3) Scoring is rare. This is VERY important to me. Before I liked Soccer, I always thought it would be the opposite - that Basketball was the superior sport on account of its finer scoring resolution. But now I get it. The rarity of a Soccer goal is what makes it meaningful, and Soccer is a much more intense sport than NFL, Basketball or anything else, really, for it. A goal is everywhere and always a game-changer, and it provides a real anchor point for going back and thinking about the game after it’s over. It has been said that the rarity of goals in Soccer leaves too much to chance. It’s true enough that the difficulty of scoring a goal means there will be edge cases where a lucky goal decides a game in favor of a team that didn’t really deserve it. But in the general case I think “expensive goals” make Soccer much more accurate in terms of choosing the winner - and for the same reason. In the general case, if you got a goal, it’s because you were good enough and worked hard enough to get it - and we know that precisely because the other team was working so hard to prevent it.

(3a) Defense is as important as offense. Yes, you can say this about any sport, but not as sincerely. The “expense” of goals guarantees it’s truer of Soccer. Soccer teams simply don’t have the luxury of sleeping on defense and hoping to make it up by outscoring their opponents. It’s a much more balanced game in this regard than any other team sport I know. Like Chess, Soccer is as much - maybe even more - about making sure no one scores on you as it is about scoring on the opponent.

(3b) It can end in a tie. Why not? The convention that one team absolutely must win is artificial. Sometimes you need more than 90minutes to decide who’s better. If you don’t have more than 90minutes, then that’s just life. If two teams are evenly-matched, I would rather the score reflect that than to have one of them be declared the winner because they happened to be on a scoring streak as the gun fired!

(4) Pacing. Perhaps this is repeating the last point a bit, but there’s something about the pacing of Soccer that mirrors my tastes in other things as well - in Literature, in Music, TV, games, even History! I like things that operate on two levels, one mundane, and one transcendent. It seems unrelated, but it’s not - it’s the same thing that led me to choose Flannery O’Connor as the subject of my senior thesis as an undergrad, the same reason that I’m fascinated with the 1970s, the reason I like Chess, the core reason that Empire Strikes Back is great and A New Hope merely entertaining. I like things that muddle along according to their own inner logic for a while, only for something to happen that exposes that consistency as false. And no, I don’t mean I like plot twists - that isn’t the same thing at all. I mean something comes along that exposes that consistency as false - in the sense that you knew all along it was false, but you couldn’t see for yourself how, and then something happens that shows you how. Put differently, the revelation that the universe is much bigger than you thought. I admit it’s a stretch to look for such lofty themes in sports - but there are physical, gut-level analogues to such themes after all, in the way we react to them. Soccer isn’t “about” anything the way Literature is, it isn’t transcendent, and it doesn’t show you the meaning of life - I KNOW. I’m just saying it has the same pacing as these other things that DO express those themes. We muddle along in mundania - possibly for the whole game, actually! And while we’re muddling along it looks like things are pretty evenly matched - but the truth is they’re not. One of these teams is better, and sooner or later, whether because the other team makes a mistake or simply doesn’t have the stuff - the clouds will lift, there will be a breach in the defense, and the goal will come shining through. Half of the fun of the game is looking to spot how, when - trying to see the weakness before it’s exposed. It’s the same sort of thrill that a good mystery novel gives you - that satisfaction of NOT having figured it out by the end, but knowing that you could have, in fact slapping yourself on the forehead for not having seen it.

(5) Bigness. I don’t mean the players or the ball, but the field. I like how things are always just out of the field of vision, how the field is just slightly too big to pay attention to all at once, how the goaltender is dwarfed by the size of the goal he has to defend, how there are always too many players on the field, and how the ref, like me, is overwhelmed trying to keep up with it. Other sports seems small by comparison.

(6) Teamwork. I feel like other team sports are kind of “team in name only” a lot of the time. Usually, they’re vehicles for the one or two stars; what combinations there are mostly serve to set up the big guy. Well, that’s not what team sports are for. Individual sports are about celebrating the individual; team sports are interesting primarily for their combination plays. It’s the same way that Chess games that involve clever sacrifices and complicated coordinated attacks are more interesting than those that are simply about straightforward attacking to thin the herd. Soccer seems to involve a lot more cooperation (I guess it isn’t accused of being “Socialist” for nothing!) than most sports, and I appreciate that. Baseball is too diffuse to really count as a “team” effort for me: there’s too much emphasis on the pitcher/hitter opposition. Basketball might as well be Hollywood - most winning teams are just vehicles for some superstar (or two). I hardly know what the point of the rest of the team even is. NFL and Hockey do a LOT better here. They can be and are team efforts. But in both cases the setup still seems artificial. NFL is still about setting up a runner: there’s a team stage when play begins, but the nature of the game whittles it down to one person in the spotlight. It’s ultimately Baseball-like in that one guy represents his team against the defense. Once it’s revealed who’s making the play, he either breaks away or he doesn’t, and then things stop and start over again. Soccer is a lot more fluid: although it’s necessarily true that only one person can have the ball at a time, the fluidity gets us really close to being able to say that it’s a team, more than a person, that has possession. Hockey is arguably the same - and maybe it even is, I don’t know. It certainly comes close. Notwithstanding, it doesn’t appear to be much of a team effort. What it looks like to me is just a bunch of people clumsily scrambling for a nearly-invisible dot. And since the guys are so huge, and have on so much armor and carry around these clubs, and the puck is sooooo tiny, the whole thing just ends up looking faintly ridiculous - like chasing a mouse around or something. But alright - I suppose if I played Hockey, or at least took the time to watch it more often, it wouldn’t look so clumsy. All the same, the setup would still feel artificial, and that’s because the rink just isn’t big enough to really require a team effort to get the puck into the goal. There is no reason in the world why you can’t play two-on-two, or three-on-three, or even one-on-one Hockey, which just exposes it. In Soccer, the field is big enough, and the goals are big enough, that eleven people per side seems necessary to deal with the situation. Granted that all sports (all games, actually) are artificial and arbitrary - Soccer does the best job of maintaining the illusion that the number of players is an organic reality, and it certainly does the most convincing job of rewarding real teamwork. A team stands or falls on its ability to work together to a MUCH greater degree in Soccer than in any other team sport I’m aware of.

(7) Beauty. Or “organic unity,” or “naturalness.” Call it what you like - Soccer has an ineffable quality that I don’t see in any other (team) sport. I made this point also in the comments section of the post that inspired this - but there’s a kind of analogue in sports of “willful suspension of disbelief.” Sports are ultimately kind of silly - the situation is contrived and so there’s nothing real at stake. It isn’t war. So, like with fiction, part of the job of the players is to make me forget the artificiality of the setup, and Soccer really shines here. It has simple and consistent rules, and not very many of them, it uses a minimum of equipment, every player on the field seems equally necessary, we understand, without needing a Master’s Degree, why every rule is the way it is, and the game starts when it starts and ends when it ends and we don’t have to stop all the goram time inbetween to remind ourselves that what we’re doing is actually pretty contrived. It’s the English Garden of sports - the team sport that seems like the kind of thing nature could have designed, as opposed to those silly French gardens where everything is in impossibly precise rows. This is why Soccer is the “beautiful sport.” NFL, by comparison, is a kludge.

And I guess that’s about I can think of now. There may be other things - but off the top of my head, that’s what I get out of Soccer - why it is, to me, anyway, not only the best existing team sport, but probably pretty close to the best possible one.

OK, I guess others will have had more intelligent things to say about the recent Reason debate about Liberaltarianism. Brink Lindsey, who got the ball rolling by inventing the term in a 2006 New Republic article, makes his (much updated, it must be said) case for severing all ties with the Right and embracing at least the rhetoric of the Left (though, honestly, the new position seems to be just to come unmoored and be an equal opportunity supporter of whichever candidate on whichever side promises us the most), and Jonah Goldberg and Matt Kibbe (Matt who?) take issue.

In a nutshell: I guess I’m getting old, but I have less and less tolerance for flourishes like this:

Goaded by the conservative message machine’s toxic mix of intolerance and self-pity, mass opinion on the right has veered off into feverish self-delusion. Witness the “birther” phenomenon. According to Public Policy Polling, 63 percent of Republicans either believe Obama was born in a foreign country or aren’t sure one way or the other. A more recent poll by the same outfit shows that 52 percent of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama with voter fraud, while another 21 percent are undecided. This polling outfit is closely tied to the Democrats, so take the exact numbers with some grains of salt if you wish. But it is beyond doubt that paranoia is rampant in right-wing circles these days.

Stop right there. Just stop. It may indeed be “beyond doubt” that “paranoia is rampant in right-wing circles these days,” but what about the Left? If you’re basing your case on the pervasiveness of right-wing paranoia, then at the very least you need to establish that the left is any better. And really, not just “any” better, but better enough that it isn’t just something we can chalk up to their being in power (people tend to be more paranoid when they’re not pulling the strings, after all). And here’s a hint about how to do that credibly: don’t cite their opponents’ polls on the subject! It isn’t just “with a grain of salt” that I take Democrat polls on whether Republicans are paranoid - since Republican paranoia seems to be their main argument against Republicans, I tend to outright discredit them!

Look, what we’re voting for isn’t the grassroots troops. It’s the elected officials. When I decide which candidate I’m going to support, I really do think the intelligent thing to do is to look not to what kind of supporters he’s attracting so much as to do an honest evaluation of what I think he’ll do in office. Granted that what kind of supporters he attracts has something to do with that - but I think we all know that politicians say a lot of things during election season to mobilize supporters that they don’t really mean and don’t tend to follow up on once they’re safely in office and largely (sadly) out of the public spotlight. If you want to know how a politician is going to vote, it isn’t enough to look at the outrageous wing of his shock troops. More revealing is going to be what moneyed interests are backing him and how dedicated they are to their causes. THESE are the groups that tend to hold politicians accountable. The shock troops just make the process official.

But in any case, in my own - admittedly unscientific - personal experience, Lindsey’s assertion here is just false on its face. YES, there are lots of Republican crazies out there. YES, they’re annoying and often downright scary. But NO, this isn’t something confined to the Republican supporters as those of us who lived through the Bush years well remember. Honestly, during the Bush years, I tilted right largely because I was so offended at the sheer idiocy of a lot of what I heard coming from the Left. It was so base and so crass and so uninformed and unintelligent and generally offputting that I found myself defending Bush in a lot of discussions just because some intellectual housecleaning seemed to be in order. Likewise, I currently find myself defending Obama a lot - and I CAN’T FUCKING STAND OBAMA - just because I get so fed up with all the stark raving idiocy I hear from the right these days. My point being that having a President Obama with a Democrat majority Congress has been therapeutic for me in a way - as a reminder that there’s no need to carry water for people I can’t stand (i.e. the Republicans for most of the 2000s) just to keep the playing field balanced; the pendulum swings anyway.

None of this is to say that I’m now tilting Left. I’m not. I’m still hugely skeptical of the “Liberaltarian” proposal mostly because I see a clearer and more present danger to our rights and freedoms from the Democrat nanny state than I do from the Republican nationalist state. That isn’t to say there isn’t a clear and present danger from the Republicans too - just that at least some people on the Republican side do talk about free markets and individual rights from time to time. I’m all for killing off the Republicans now while they’re weak as a strategy for replacing them with a resurgent Libertarian Party (a surgent Libertarian Party?), but that’s pure opportunism. I’d be just as happy - happier, probably - to advocate moving in on Dem territory if they were the weak ones.

Long story short, Lindsey isn’t winning me over with this kind of crass pandering, and it’s galling that he thinks he can win anyone over that way. It’s just a fantasy, but I really wish we could found a movement to just start publicly ridiculing people who make these kinds of transparently awful arguments. If you want my support, give me a reason. Don’t fucking say things like “some poll from an admittedly unreliable source said that these people are ignorant,” because therefore WHAT? Therefore I don’t even bother to check wheter the ticket I’m being sold is equally ignorant or even worse? Fuck off, Brink Lindsey.

Discussing EconTalk with Noah today inevitably turned toward some of Russ Roberts’ tics. On the menu: whether Economics is a science. It’s a question Roberts likes to return to again and again, and it’s a frustrating one for me because I think it’s ultimately a red herring. Meaning: whether or not Economics is a science depends to a great degree on what you mean by “science,” and what Roberts really seems to be after isn’t so much an answer to the question of which side of that fence Economics is on as whether Economists should feel as confident in their policy pronouncements as they seem to. To me anyway, the answers seem clear: YES, Economics is a science and NO, Economists shouldn’t be as confident in their policy pronouncements as they seem to be.

I think the real issue isn’t so much the scientific status of Economics but rather some frustrations Roberts seems to have (and, to the extent I’m guessing right, I share) with how the general public thinks about science. In particular, there are two things we could clarify for the public that would address my concerns.

One - the public doesn’t seem to have a real grasp of the distinction between so-called “hard” and “soft” sciences, and that’s unfortunate because it’s an important distinction. Now, like any other polar adjectives, these really define a spectrum that’s mostly made up of grey. No, I don’t know EXACTLY where to draw the line between “hard” and “soft” sciences; they’re defined in terms of each other. The “hard” sciences I understand to be those where (a) it’s clear what the proper domain of inquiry is and (b) it is relatively easy to settle theoretical disputes. Physics is of course the cannonical example: it’s quite clear what is and isn’t a physics question, and though Physicists do disagree with each other about theory, they rarely disagree on how to settle the dispute. What constitutes “compelling evidence” is pretty clear-cut, and this is possible because Physics is one of those rare fields where it’s (relatively) easy to identify and control for all the potential confounding variables. The “soft” sciences are those where either the domain of inquiry or the method for settling disputes is unclear - usually both. Economics, for its part, does seem to have both problems. Not all Economists agree on just what it is they’re studying in the first place, and even for those who do there isn’t a clear-cut way of settling disputes. For reasons both practical and ethical, it is usually impossible to run controlled Economics experiments, leaving both parties to a theoretical dispute free to name any number of potential confounding variables that could be “skewing” the results to their opponant’s liking.

My point is that the public doesn’t seem to appreciate this distinction. In popular parlance, “science” just means “hard science,” so when you call something a “science” you’re implying that not only is the domain of inquiry clear (the public probably thinks that Economists study “money”), but that such disputes as arise are easily settled by just “doing more research.” But of course none of this is true of Economics, and so if I’m right about public ignorance of a “hard/soft” distinction in sciences, it probably overrates Economists’ expertise.

To quote Friedrich Hayek on why he would’ve advised against having a Nobel Prize in Economics (ironically delivered at the banquet honoring his receipt of same):

…the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess… This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally.

That’s not exactly the same concern I’m expressing, but it’s awfully close. In either case, the issue is that an Economist’s “expert” pronouncements are less likely to carry the support of his colleagues than those for a practitioner of one of the hard sciences.

Two - the public is generally unaware of how much controversy there is even within “hard” sciences. That is to say, where I think the public intellectually understands that no field ever reaches complete consensus about conclusions that it then identifies as absolute truths, emotionally, lacking the direct experience of seeing scientists square off about theory, they just don’t get it. It’s sort of the same way almost any member of the public will readily agree with you that politicians are not to be trusted, but when election time rolls around they seem awfully sold on the idea that their guy really is going to change things for good this one time. Intellectually they know that politicians need to be grilled and pinned down on just what, exactly, it is that they plan to do in office, but emotionally they only ever like to see this happen to “the other guy.” The public’s perception of politicians is simultaneously too cynical and too idealistic. It seems to think that in a mass of exploiters, we’re trying to identify the one diamond in the rough who will wield power impartially. In fact, the political system would undoubtedly function better if everyone just accepted that politicians were career-minded individuals to be approached with the same skepticism that you would approach a new hire at your family company. You don’t expect middle management to care about your grandfather the founder’s good name in the same way that you do, so you work with what does motivate him (prestige and financial renumeration) to obtain the best outcome for the company. Well, the public is similarly both too skeptical and too idealistic about scientists. They accept that theories are often falsified, but they assume that once a theory is falsified that it was always bad. In fact, science is always just reasoning to the best explanation. The theories we accept today have no more claim to timeless truth status than the theories of the past, nor were the scientists of the past stupid or misguided to believe what they believed. Creationists exploit this, for example, by reminding people that Darwinism is “just a theory.” It’s the “just” that’s pernicious, because it plays on the public’s misunderstanding that scientific truths ever graduate from being theories to accepted fact. Since no theory does this ever, Darwinism’s status as being “just a theory” is no more a mark against it than it is against all those theories that help us build rockets that reach the Moon.

Again, I think the issue isn’t so much one of whether Economics is science but one of how the public understands science. Once you call an Economist a “scientist,” the public will overestimate how much he knows about how the Economy runs. Like every other science, Economics just reasons to the best explanation, and perhaps Roberts would be less nervous about economic policy advisors calling themselves “scientists” if the public had a better grasp of that fact.

If the public understood first that NO scientific theory is ever an a priori truth, and if it simultaneously understood that some sciences produce softer claims in their theories than others, then I think there would be comparatively little harm from Economists giving policy advice, and I think Roberts, in particular, would have less to complain about in terms of his colleagues’ vanities. What I don’t think is that there’s anything wrong in general with calling Economics a “science.” Economics is a science. It gathers evidence in a systematic way, forms explanatory models on the basis of that evidence which are leveraged to make predictions about what future data collection will come up with, and it self-evaluates on the basis of how accurate those predictions turn out to be. It’s a science. It’s just not a “hard” science like Physics - so its conclusions are more open to interpretation - and even “hard” sciences can’t make the claim to ultimate truth that a lot of the public seems ascribe to them.

So the issue of whether Economics is a science is a red herring. Rather than trying to bully his colleagues into admiting that they’re not scientists when in fact they are, I think Roberts’ efforts would be better directed at educating the public about what kind of science Economics is as well as what science does in general. Cause and effect are backward here. Economists don’t overestimate their own importance, they are overly important because the public overestimates what they can do. Once the public gets it right, the pretentions that bother Roberts will stop. And if reeducating the public seems hopeless, I would submit that there is simply no other way. Even if you could convince Bon Jovi that millions of adoring fans don’t make him God, there’s always Bono. As long as there is an adoring public looking for an excuse to believe that their politician has the indisputably right answer to whatever the economic woe du jour happens to be, there will be economists willing to fill the role of arbiter of truth that the public allows them to fill.